Chris Marker (born Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve) was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983) and AK (1985), an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Marker is often associated with the Left Bank Cinema movement that occurred in the late 1950s and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi and Armand Gatti.

His friend and sometime collaborator Alain Resnais has called him "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man." Film theorist Roy Armes has said of him: "Marker is unclassifiable because he is unique...The French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker."

Written by Jean Claude-Carrière and Chris Marker, directed by Marker, commissioned by S.E.P.T. and financed by the Onassis Foundation. The series was filmed in Tblisi, Athens, Paris, Berkeley and Tokyo, with appearances from Iannis Xenakis, Michel Serres, Cornelius Castoriadis and others, screened on the Franco-German TV network Arte in 1989 and on Channel 4 in 1991 (where it was voiced by Bob Peck). The series was never broadcasted in Greece, since the Onassis Foundation had taken offence at George Steiner’s statement that ancient Greece was nothing to do with modern Greece; that modern Greece was a farce and a joke. The foundation had demanded an apology. Marker gave them space to respond to Steiner, but the foundation were not content with this. (Source)